[EM] Bill Clark: rejecting Mike Ossipoff's rules for being wrong

[Craig Carey]

Regrettably I wrote a criticism of Mike Ossipoff.
Regarding Mr Shulze, he ought be testing the whole algorithm and
especially the joins between cases, and not placing his trust in
apparently missing details on the correctness of feathering a
"Floyd" algorithm. There is nothing much in people hinting that
their algorithm is best while they do not actually have a right
test (and if any, then the results of using it). When other
people run right tests over Condorcet, not much would be left
except wrong claims of goodness (which is different from the
current state of being unaware of the facts).

Mike Ossipoff is substantially a very anonymous person. Presumably
that frees up other people to be reckless in their comments about
him. Also his writings are designed for an audience that knows
nothing about voting. What exists is what remains are years of
persons who quit because they detected too much untruth.


| [EM] Bill & our definitions
| wclark at xoom.org wclark at xoom.org
| Thu Jan 29 20:06:15 2004
|
| Bill said:
|
|
|
| >>CC doesn't say anything about requiring "fully specified" preferences.
|
| > I skipped over this part (because I figured I already knew what
| > a "sincere vote" was, but apparently not:)
|
| Mike replied:
|
| > No, apparently not. But that didn't stop you from expounding on the
| > list about something that you hadn't read about.
|
| Here's the definition [ http://www.electionmethods.org/evaluation.htm ]
|

Mike's definitions on the webpage are strange. Here is one that
anti-Republican:

   :  Statement of Criterion
   :
   :  If all votes are sincere, the Ideal Democratic Winner should win
   :  if one exists.


With the word "Democratic" being capitalized, it would seem to refer to
the US Democratic party (a nation-wide party).


| > A sincere vote is one with no falsified preferences or preferences
| > left unspecified when the election method allows them to be
| > specified (in addition to the preferences already specified).
|
| I'd read it, or rather mis-read it... then on second reading, I flat-out
| mis-understood it.

The "sincere vote" definition is relied upon by other (hoax) "rules" in
the webpage, i.e. by the "ruleS" 'GCC', 'SFC', and 'GSFC'.

Just a tiny rip and pull on that will destroy the possibility that Mike
is competent at preferential voting theory, by turning his rules into
(apparently incomprehensible) prescriptions on how to *certify*
preferential voting methods.

Of course no one wants certification of preferential voting methods.

Persons will reject that when it is offered.

Mike only offers chances to get a preferential voting method
certified.

Now people must search for some certifying authority or else reject
the possibility that Mike's can even certify.

A problem now appears and it is this: Mr Mike Ossipof (if that is his
true name: he had a surname with a different spelling in 1998)
verifiable can't actually certify a made-up TWO CANDIDATE preferential
voting method using many of his rules (just the ones he made up).

Unlike myself, readers here will make all sorts of bad mistakes
in their considerations of 3 candidate elections. However we get these
Americans that explaining that they can sense difficulties learning
from a person who can't stop writing apparently and who also is not
a great expert with the rudiments of 2 candidate elections that have
only 4 papers (2 of those are replaced if the so called checkboxy
Approval method is being considered).

Bill Clark seems to be explaining to the readers that gullibility
can promptly lead into problems. Indeed that is the case. Th
same can be said of striving to replicate the rule into some
substance of "understanding" instead of accessing the quantifier
logic formula that is in the rule. Why not simply write factually
and say if the rule contains a usable QE logic test or not /.

We have known right from day 1 (circa April 2000) that the rules
could not be used. You are about 4 years behind the times.

It can be difficult to get comments from older members while there
is such a continuing exodus. But as some know, Mr Lanphier would
never contemplate having a truthful mailing list that didn't lose
so many subscribers.

Mainly the best of the mathematicians write at the
politicians-and-polytopes mailing list.



|                    It was the part about expressing preferences that
| threw me, because my mindset at the time was that "preferring" a candidate
| was the same thing as having that candidate "voted higher."
|

The text "rank" is all over the webpage of Ossipoff.

It has been an unchanging fact that the preferredness rises as the ranking
number falls.

The preference of a candidate is somehow proportional to the negative
of the ranking number. Mike insists on missing out the "negative" word.
We could use the idea of the reciprocal, but which of the hoax Russ
and Mike "ruleS" (certification options (with the name of the certifying
authority understated)) imply that an optimal methods is a non-linear
method ?. No one need answer that of course.

I quote from the fallacy asserting webpage of Mike:

> In the ordinal methods (Condorcet, Borda, and IRV), a candidate is
>  "voted higher" by being ranked higher.

That is clear. But it is untrue if the papers are those of STV and
the Alternative Vote.

The facts stand. It is hard to get false information off that
website.

I assume Mike might produce (another) suggestion that he saw the
problem and he is not going to admit that he is in the wrong.

Mike can see and concede that he got the wording impossible to
follow.

Maybe he can fix up the webpage and improve it.

| I wasn't thinking in terms of a preference being something in your head,
| but rather something you marked on a ballot.  So my working definition of
| "sincere vote" at the time went something like this:
|
| "A sincere vote is one with no falsified preferences."
|
| Then, when I went back and re-read the definition, I didn't carry the "no"
| through to apply to the latter half of the sentence, and so completely
| misinterpreted its meaning. (And to be honest, I still have no idea
| precisely what the parenthetical comment at the end is supposed to mean,
| or why it's necessary... and I also still think another "no" in front of
| "preferences left unspecified" would help make it less ambiguous.)
|

Is that an allegation that the wording is ambiguous?.

I guess not and the big intent was of Bill to say that he failed to
understand. Bill is trying to interpret a staggeringly bad wording.

We won't want is yet more fake defences from Mike.

We got those in 2000AD. About 3.5 years ago Mike let it be known
that he didn't want to improve the wording of the rules.

Bill is implying that a decision of 3-4 years ago was leading to a
current deficiency of understanding.

Really, what happens if you (Bill) acquire that understanding ?.

Does that lead to a "feeling" that you were successfully "taught"?,
(rather than a way to test or fail a preferential voting method ?).

It was Bill who started this by being gullible.

Bill, can you be so informative as to post up the reasoning for that?.
I don't want to be insistent since you were manufacturing
*understanding*. Perhaps you would tell us what you have already got.

*Understanding* here could mean: recoving meaning from deliberately
useless wordings.

A Quantifier logic formulation (i.e. containing (Exists), (For All))
would be more comprehensible.

Mike can't do it himself. I have bnever seen Mike Ossipoff every
produce a proof or argument that says that says that some good
rules can't be put into a quantifier logic formulation.

I think he talks about he can't go the full distance and use the
lanugage of the topic. Instead he has always expanding list of 
acronyms he seems to deliberately avoid defining adequately.


| ... and that's probably more than anyone probably ever wanted to know
| about the process of one particularly confused chain of thought. :)
|
| Bill said:
|
| > It still looks like Approval satisfies CC, under the same sort of
| > interpretation given for MC.
|

Ah, the familiar ground of yet another acronym we have no recollection
of the meaning of ("MC"). Those hoax certification criteria of Mike
and Russ Piaella
   http://www.russp.org/

are perfectly useless and I'd much prefer that the dogmatists
popularizing them, avoided acronyms. While they are lying about their
importance, they can be denied a freedom to use an acronym or even
the name too. Instead the non-definition's wording can be repeated
at every use.


...
| Again, I was initially thinking that "prefer" was something that happened
| on the ballot, rather than in somebody's head... so it made perfect sense
| to extend the notion of "voted higher" to "prefer" so that CC could apply
| to Approval.
|

There has never been a year when the Piaell+Ossipoff rules had a meaning
that was representable in an equation.

I called them Oss spirits.

If Brits or Canadians are withholding clues on their sincerity then
the Mike Oss follower whacks the data out of them.

All that sincerity data is used to weaken the rules. So the less
success the (not admitted to) Oss things have, then the tougher the
rule gets.

It has always been the case that one of Mike's Ossipoff's rules
perfectly fails the (admittedly atrocious) checkboxy Approval
method. Of coruse Mike has always denied that, despite seeming to
claim in about c. April 2000 that the rules are supposed to pass
the Approval method.



| Anyway, it was all ultimately due to my incorrect thinking about
| preferences.  But if you're going to get on my case, I figured it might as
| well be about the right thing. :)
|
| -Bill Clark
|

What is this about incorrect thinking ?. I guess that a reply to me
would show that.

Bill is suggsting that witless gullibility (i.e. tolerating Mike's
thinking) leads to grave difficulties in getting good-enough meanings
from statements that Mike has written (and edited and re-edited over
years).

A tactical mistake by Bill: seeking understanding. Mike often writes
on the importance of tactics. He does not say that voters are making
so many mistakes in their tactics that their views must be ignored.
Maybe he expects mistakes to be under a carefully withheld percentage.

If Bill Clark is in the mood for it, he can access the percentage.

However the data is imprecise, never accessed, and it is never used,
and its physical dimensions are unknown.

In the circumstances we quite after getting told that Mike is a
foremost leader into tactical voting. I recall the argument: a first
idea is to fail to say that there is only one winner. There is no
need to say that there are 0 winners, despite the damage that causes
to Mikes rules. Then we get to hear that votes (e.g. for Tory party
leaders) will be all around the ideal of maximizing utility values.

Perhaps Mr Schulze can find a reference for the Americans.

Who reads Mike and does not understand him ?. 

Let's have a look at one of the webpage's rules:

        -------------------------------------
        Strong Defensive Strategy Criterion (SDSC)
        Statement of Criterion

        If a majority prefers one particular candidate to another, then
        they should have a way of voting that will ensure that the other
        cannot win, without any member of that majority reversing a
        preference for one candidate over another or falsely voting two
        candidates equal.
        -------------------------------------

The word "majority" is much too undefined.
Also "falsely" is containing a garbage (Ossipoffian) meaning.
Also the use of the word "ensure" is excessive.

What is it that makes "two candidates equal" ?. without seeing the
wording (and while not overlooking that "equal" lacks a meaning),
it would be a weighted sum of papers.

See the word "reversing". Let's do what Mike probably never did
do, and write down some ballot papers (symbols):

  1(A)
  1(AB)
  1(ABC)

What is being reversed is "a preference" says Mike.
It is only one preference that is reversed,

The trick is to put over major 20 errors into each paragraph.
I suspect I would have trouble finding over 8 to 13 in any given
paragraph of Mike Ossipoff (it should have 3 lines or more).

I never found out if Mike Ossipoff lived in Cuba. However this
is an American mailing list and to threaten the right of one to
have ulterior wrong purposes harming anybody else potentially
may seem blunt or impolite. It is a cultural sensitivity topic
(outside of maths (the algebra of fairness)).

It is getting really ambiguous on how to reverse 1 preference 
in a 3 preference list.

Anyway, even bottom ranking theorists can have their bad days.

--------------

What you see is what you actually get with Mike, and what everyone
sees, is this:

    He de-emphasizes the idea of preferences being on ballot papers.

Partly that is done saying that ballot papers are owned by "hes"
and "shes".

Why didn't Mike say he held that desire in one paragraph and then
produce perhaps a message a month ?.

At Americanized mailing list, secrecy tremendously raises the
confidence of the subscribers in the person who maintains the
secrecy. A lot of other people are thoroughly united with Mike
over that particular detail: a wrong purpose that is withheld
with great secrecy yet it possibly dominates the wordings in the
e-mail messages.

Who would be more unknown around here than the owner of the mailing
list. This mailing list is fulfilling a major place in USA's
history here (particularly now that Mr Ken Arrow's Soc Choice journal
is running so badly that more and more libraries would be
unsubscribing from it [however Public Choice has not died yet]).


| --
| Dennis Kucinich for President in 2004
| http://kucinich.us/
|

Gullibile people prefer Kucinich is hinted at here. I am out of
the country so I am not voting for him anyway.

---------------

Mike was criticising Woodall's Later No Harm.

He produced the same false claim that the so called IRV method let
a preceding preference for a complete loser dissipate the power of
the paper too much. That is a trait of the ideal. The algebra shows
that Mike is wrong, and nothing ever changes.

Also Mike never mentioned Truncation Resistance. That is quite
bad. However since about 1998 the whole mailing list has had
no good successs with getting the rule mentioned and its importance
commented on.

Simply, to replace Truncation Resistance with Woodall's Later No Harm
is favourable to the "false claim" criteria that Mike advanced as
being good. So either Mike is completely in the wrong for criticising
Later No Harm ("LNH") or else he is rejecting Truncation Resistance.

That is a big change from the previous stance of having no
intelligent or important comments on Truncation Resistance.

Mike keeps saying he might post up axioms and his choice alone will
decide his set of axioms.

Who would have guessed: firstly he forgets to mention the public
and the voters and his capacity to lose all arguments on fairness
and how to model it. He instead says that his personal choice is
the judge. Notwithstanding how he never pens a word in defence of
fairness, we still would check that his rules are fair.

---

To some extent this is a problem with Dave Clark. He went to
school and learnt how to read and write. Then he finds garbage
and then did not simply and readily identify them as such. Instead
he was trying to repair the meaning. The purpose of the creator
of the rules is set against fairness and even if the Mike's
thought of the moment could be recovered, it is best to not do
that while the dark purpose of the rules has not been properly
inquired into.



Craig Carey